


Peni Parker

by Lila17



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, im tired i'll add other tags later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23423410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lila17/pseuds/Lila17
Summary: And then, they tell her that that was her father, that being SP//dr was the ‘important’ work he was doing. Peni doesn’t know what her father’s face looks like off the top of her head, and she barely has enough time to start connecting the SP//dr suit with him in her mind before they tell her that they need her to take his place."It’s a matter of genetics, dear. Compatibility."Her aunt’s name is May and her uncle’s name is Ben. They tell her that she needs to become SP//dr in the sixth sentence they ever say to her.Peni Parker is 15. She has been SP//dr for six years, and she is so very tired.
Comments: 25
Kudos: 60





	Peni Parker

**Author's Note:**

> hi. So, some explanations in no real order:
> 
> I don't know super much about the actual SP//dr comics. I read the first volume/origin story volume, in which Peni has to take her father's place as SP//dr after he dies when she's nine years old. Between that and the fact that they let the spider into the room to possibly bite her without asking her first, that gave me the general impression of Oh Jeez That's Kind Of Fucked Up. It's been a while since I read that though and I haven't really read the other issues/volumes, so. I can't claim to be an expert on what actually goes on over there. I guess we could just throw comic canon out the window and say that this is a very elaborate headcanon for the movie exclusively, if it doesn't really match up.
> 
> Um what else...I'm kinda posting this fast. I wanted to finish a rough draft of an original fiction story before April, and I told my sister to make me post Everything I actually had written material for but still hadn't posted for whatever reason if I didn't finish the draft. I didn't! Point is that there are still flaws in this story, in my opinion, that would really make me waffle and stall on posting it under normal circumstances, but lucky you you're getting it Now. 
> 
> Written for queerli! *blows kiss*

Peni hates Miles Morales.

Well- no, no she doesn’t. 

But she  _ does_.

...god this is so complicated. 

—————-

Miles is an all around good person. He’s friendly. He’s funny. Given the opportunity and the time to acclimate, he’s a good Spider-Man. He saves people the way they all do.

Except it’s just that- okay. Some seed got planted during their first big conversation together, and it only grew from there. Peni Parker considers herself a nice person, a not-mean one, she truly does but it’s just that- some part of her hates Miles’ guts.

When she first got back to her dimension, she worked for days until she managed to create a device that could communicate between dimensions. So, she contacts the rest of the spider-people as often as she can. They talk often, sharing stories about people they’ve fought or saved, and get advice from each other. Miles asks for advice the most out of any of them, predictably enough, and any time he asks for help Peni can’t stop a wave of scorn from slamming to the forefront of her mind.

_ Suck it up!  _ she wants to yell.  _ Deal with it! Just figure it out on your own!  _ There’s a long list of things she wants to scream that she would never, ever type or send.

Because Peni doesn’t  _ hate  _ Miles- she resents him. And that’s a different thing entirely.

————————

So. Let’s do this one last time.

Peni Parker is nine years old. She has never known her father. For most of her life, she has lived at a series of boarding schools while her father was away doing something ‘important’.

But she knows about SP//dr- everyone does. Peni knows people in her own  _ class _ who have been saved by SP//dr, and they always seemed infallible, untouchable- right up until the day that they died.

And then, they tell her that that was her father, that being SP//dr was the ‘important’ work he was doing. Peni doesn’t know what her father’s face looks like off the top of her head, and she barely has enough time to start connecting the SP//dr suit with him in her mind before they tell her that they need her to take his place.

_ It’s a matter of genetics, dear. Compatibility. _

Her aunt’s name is May and her uncle’s name is Ben. They tell her that she needs to become SP//dr in the sixth sentence they ever say to her.

They tell her that yes, it hurts, yes, it’s unpleasant, and then in the same breath they tell her that they already released the spider in the room and that it’s probably already found her. Raw fear spikes through her, the first time she’s ever felt it like that but not be the last ( _not the last, no, not the last, after that moment _ certainly  _ not the last_).

They don’t even ask her beforehand. This girl who doesn’t know how to fight, who barely knows how to throw a punch, and they don’t ask.

_ Will he bite me?....................................................................................Only if you let him. _

And she hesitates on whether she really wants to say no for- one second. She thinks about all the good that SP//dr’s done, how much the city needs their hero. She thinks about the stupid fantasies that everyone’s had, how she’s imagined what it would feel like to be a superhero herself before. She thinks about if she’s really the only person who can do this, and what it will mean for the city if she refuses. She hesitates for one second, and the spider bites her.

She becomes a superhero. It’s fun at first.

—————————-

Miles is a normal kid, with a life and a choice. He chooses to be Spider-Man anyway.  _ Why?- _

Miles is inexperienced, and whenever he messes up the others correct him gently. They don’t demand that he learn everything immediately.  _ How- _

Peni could never regret the people she’s saved. Never. She feels the value in all their lives, and she’s grateful from the bottom of her heart that she was able to be there for them when they needed her.

She wasn’t-  _ opposed_, maybe. If it had happened to her on accident, alone, a random spider, maybe she would have followed the same path anyway. Tried to help people. It’s just that-

It’s just that.

Sometimes she wants to scream at them, shake them. Ask them what they were thinking. Why they couldn’t come up with a better plan- why they couldn’t  _ do  _ something, make a new spider, make a new suit, work around it, why they couldn’t come up with a better plan than getting a nine year old to fight for them.

She sees nine year old kids sometimes-  _ saves  _ nine year old kids sometimes- and imagines doing the same, taking the burden she knows intimately well and placing it on their shoulders.

Never. Never, never, never. She would never make that choice.

——————————

So here’s why sweet, cheerful, fourteen-year-old Peni Parker resents Miles: he gets just about every choice that she never got.

And it’s not rational, she knows that. The resentment is misplaced, and it’s not actually Miles that she’s angry with. She doesn’t wake up in the morning  _ wanting  _ to hate Miles Morales- still doesn’t make it stop.

Miles is thirteen and he gets a choice. When Peni was thirteen, she had already been SP//dr for four years.

That seed bloomed when they first met, utterly irrational, because of reasons she didn’t even consciously realize at the time.

(He’s so weak. It disgusts her, because- you’re not  _ allowed  _ to be weak, you have to get up and fight, you have to be strong. You have to be better. You have to grow up. It’s what they made  _ her _ do.)

The anger had just flared to life inside her. The idea that this kid could just waltz in and claim that he was going to save everyone when he didn’t even have a clue about this job, how difficult it could be. When he’s so  _ weak_, or  _ something_, and maybe that disgusts her. Or maybe it just scares her. 

_ “Can you rewire a mainframe while being shot at? _ ”  _ She snaps. _

_ “Can I what?” _

_ She flings a piece of circuitry at him. “Show me!” _

In the moment, she didn’t even know why she was so angry. She told herself she was just- annoyed. No reason why. She didn’t really get  _ deep  _ into the self-psychoanalysis until later.

But almost the worst part of the conversation was when they as a group decided that Miles wasn’t, in fact, ready, and walked away to talk about it. When they decided that Miles not being ready meant that he shouldn’t have to fight.

Because Miles is weak, and allowed to be weak, in every place where Peni was demanded to be strong.

———————-

Somewhere, she slips.

She doesn’t notice it  _ while  _ she is slipping, but she sure notices it afterward. The first time comes in the form of a simple private message from Noir (whose name is technically just Peter, but they have three Peters so they have to call him Noir to distinguish).

**Why do you talk less when Miles is around?** it reads. It sends Peni into a panic because she has no idea how to respond to that.

**Do I do that?** she sends back, finally.

The response comes near instantly.  **Yes.** Peni quietly curses Noir’s mysterious ability to adapt to technology that should be  _ way  _ beyond him (that doesn’t involve colors, at least) so quickly.

**Huh. I didn’t realize.**

Noir seems vaguely like the sort of person who could see through a lie at thirty yards,  _ and _ say it like that, ‘thirty yards’, whatever that means, so she counts it as a blessing that this is all online. Even if...even if she’s typing in a way that’s pretty strange for her. Usually she doesn’t have all the perfect capitalization and punctuation like this, but she’s nervous and just ended up matching Noir’s typing style. Hopefully he hasn’t adapted quite fast enough to pick up on things like that.

She rushes to send another message before he can say anything.  **I can try to talk to him more?? lol**

The moment it sends, she slams the communicator closed and tries to get back to her homework. Five minutes later, she gets an alert that there’s a hostage situation developing in another part of the city and she needs to come in, which is some incredible timing right there. She opens the communicator again and taps a button to make a red circle form around her icon (a little message to the others of “can’t talk right now, I’m out spidering”) and gets going.

Fighting. Fighting is what she’s good at now. Peni’s teachers praise her ability in science classes, but the thing that she’s best at hasn’t been a school subject for a long time.

————————-

After that, she tries to talk more to Miles. Noir doesn’t message her again, and she just about thinks she’s gotten away with it.

They’re all together in person for once, because a new restaurant opened in Peter’s universe and he insisted that they all come in order to settle an argument with Miles about dimensional restaurant quality. They’re casually walking back now, and by complete accident, Peni just so happens to be walking next to Noir in the back of the group. Mostly it’s because Peni has the shortest legs out of everyone, and because Noir has the longest legs really but he likes to stay at the back of the group and brood.

Gwen is talking about trying to balance final exams with everything else, and Peter is chiming in stories about doing the same thing but in  _ college_. Gwen turns around and asks how Peni deals with it.

Peni just shrugs. “I’m pretty fine, actually. If there was even a sign that I wasn’t handling my schoolwork well and it could interfere with being SP//dr, I feel like Oscorp would find  _ some  _ way to make my teachers give me less work.” At the end, a tinge of something leaks into her voice.

Gwen just looks like she wants to mutter “ _Lucky_ ” but Noir stops walking. Automatically, Peni stops with him, and then immediately her anxiety spikes when Noir waves for everyone else to keep walking. He just stares at her for a while.

“You’re angry,” He says finally.

And- and something in his voice calms her down a little, or at the very least prevents her from trying to maneuver her way out of having to respond. Because it’s not shocked or surprised, not “You’re  _ angry_?” just. “You’re angry.” A statement. An observation.

Peni doesn’t really say yes, just shrugs, but it doesn’t matter because that’s as good as a confirmation anyway. 

“Could I ask about what?”

And there it is again. No surprise, no questioning why  _ she  _ of all people would be angry about something. Then the rest of her mind catches up with what’s happening and she ends up ducking her head and looking away from him.

“It’s- it doesn’t matter,” she says, flushing a little from embarrassment, because- what is she even doing? Pretty much all of the other spider-people would give a  _ lot  _ to have an organization willing to help them stay on top of their civilian life like that. Why is she complaining?

“Hmm,” Noir says, another statement somehow, completely nonjudgmental. He starts walking again and she follows.

Maybe it’s because she wishes there was a part of her life that didn’t relate to being SP//dr, that it didn’t consume so much of her life the way it does. Maybe it’s because she wishes they weren’t so willing. Maybe it’s because a part of her wishes that someone would ask that she go back to school and become a normal kid again.

But it’s still stupid and maybe even selfish, so she drops it and Noir lets her.

————————

And it’s so-  _ complicated  _ because the truth is, SP//dr is doing good work, important work. Peni saved thirteen people, including a new mother, from a collapsing building last week and does she regret that? No. 

And it’s like- what would she rather have been doing? Being in her room? Doing homework? She can’t leverage something as inconsequential as sitting on her bed, doing math and listening to music, against people’s  _ lives_. It’s obvious, right? Anyone would make that choice.

Except that she makes that choice over and over and over again and she’s been doing it since she was nine and she’s tired. She’s her own person, she feels like she deserves to say no sometimes, except in any individual situation it would never feel  _ okay  _ to say no. 

She’s nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and it’s always the question of how much she’s supposed to give, and the answer is always  _ more_. And sometimes she is- she is  _ tired_\- and she wants to say screw all of it, she is tired of being strong and making the hard choices. Let someone else make them.

But no one at Oscorp would understand that. She can feel it. These are the people who handed responsibility to a child and if they had reservations didn’t show it, and they would just look at her and say with disappointed eyes,  _ I thought you understood how important SP//dr was, Peni. _ She would have to have a complete nervous breakdown (which might not be too impossible, haha morbid humor) for them to take her seriously, and that would be. Messy.

There’s parts that she loves about being SP//dr and parts that she hates, and it’s all so, so, complicated.

But who can she talk to about it?

_ You can talk to Noir _ , her mind whispers.  _ Noir sounds like he understands anger. He probably does, if what I know about the 1930s is true. _

_ You could talk to Peter B, too. He’s been Spider-Man for twenty years, he must know something. _

_ You could talk to Gwen.  _

_ You could talk to Ham. _

_ You could talk to...Miles. _

But she won’t, but she can’t, because they’re all tied together by being Spider-People but she lies every day because sometimes she doesn’t even  _ want  _ to be 

SP//dr. She just wants to- give it up. Stop. Jump all the way back to nine-year-old Peni who hesitated on saying no,  _ hesitated _ , never said yes out loud just  _ hesitated _ , and articulate what she never said. 

God, she’s tired. She’s too tired to even have her weird misdirected hatred towards Miles. 

This is what ties their group together, this is what makes it so that they’re all not alone, and she’s lying about it. She can’t share  _ that.  _ She can’t talk to them, not on this.

Well. They wanted a strong, self-sufficient little girl? They got her.

———————————

She- 

_ She is SP//dr. She is infallible, untouchable. She’s saved people in her own class before. And she loves this job; she loves that she can save people, help them, return them back home to their families. She’s lucky to be able to do it. So every day, no matter how many hits she takes, she  _ always  _ finds a way to come back. _

She is Peni Parker. She is a child, and they demanded that she become a fighter when she didn’t want to. They forced her to make the hard choices, and she made them. But it has been years and years, and she is tired of  _ sacrifice _ , and she is tired of always finding a way to come back. She just wants to quit. They demand so much of her, and they never should have in the first place.

———————————

Peni’s gas tank is empty but the fumes are keeping her going in fits and spurts. She’s fifteen now. She they _she_ keep saying one more person, one more person, one more person, and she keeps pulling it off but who knows how long that’s going to last?

Her thoughts flip flop (keep going, stop, keep going) from day to day and she can’t stave off the feeling that it’s all going to collapse soon, as terrifying as that is. She’s messing up operations as Sp//dr almost every day because she’s so- distracted, rattled?- but she keeps doing her job as best as she can. She also keeps making jokes and acting cheerful in the spider-person chat, and who cares if she talks less when certain people are around or not or what. 

She ignores all private messages from Noir. She doesn’t feel like dealing with it right now.

——————————-

And after all that, it’s a random, casual little Tuesday afternoon when it finally happens. It’s been a long time coming.

She gets the alert on her phone, that there’s a bank robbery happening downtown with unusually high powered weapons. Most of the other spiders have to seek out crime themselves, but Peni’s got the resources of a massive corporation at her back so most of the time they identify the situation themselves and then call her in.

And it’s so  _ normal _ . It’s the exact type of situation she’s been dealing with for years- easy, simple, straightforward. A day like this is as close to a day off as she gets.

But for some reason, she doesn’t get up. She just sits there staring at the alert, making no move to respond to it. She just stares and stares and stares, and- something’s wrong. She doesn’t want to get up, and she’s not.

SP//dr’s not getting back up.

The phone screen goes dim and turns itself off, and she blows out a breath as if somehow the responsibility is gone too. But it’s- it’s  _ not _ , and why isn’t she moving?

_ I’m exhausted _ , she thinks. A statement, an observation.

She stands up out of the chair and does nothing but turn and collapse onto the bed a few feet away. She buries her face in a pillow, limp like she just ran a marathon, and she starts laughing from the ridiculousness of it.

What is  _ happening _ ?

She is so tired.

Is this what a breakdown feels like? Good to know.

In that moment, she thinks about every time over the last couple of years when she’s wanted to give up and  _ stop _ . She’s been functioning off a kind of water tension of willpower- she doesn’t give up simply because she never has.

Lying facedown on her bed, knowing she needs to get up and realizing that she  _ can’t _ , the water tension bursts.

———————

Did she- did she just give up? That’s wrong, spider-people aren’t supposed to do that. 

But she-

_ God-screw-the-city-she’s-so-tired-she-can’t-take-one-more-step. _

————————

Maybe she should be calling in to report that she’s sick. They listen to that, at least, if she makes it sound serious enough. She doesn’t do that. 

Usually, she would tap a little button at the bottom of the alert to communicate that she read it and is on her way right now. This time, she just turns off her phone.

And- and funny, you would think that after giving up on being SP//dr she would go back to doing some of those normal kid things she apparently so desperately craves. But she couldn’t imagine doing homework or anything else right now.

She wants to just go to sleep, or maybe collapse until her body decomposes and the ground swallows her. But the next few hours are probably going to be an ordeal with Ben and May- one she’ll need to be awake for. So she ends up playing a random game on her computer, head propped up on one hand.

Five minutes after that, her phone spontaneously turns itself on  _ just in time! _ for it to receive an incoming call from May.  _ Disappointed but not surprised _ .

“Peni, did you get the alert?” are the first words that May says, tersely, distractedly.

“Yes,” Peni says, deciding whether she wants to make the wallpaper of her fake restaurant pink or green. 

“Will you be here soon?”

Some kind of anger sparks inside her at those words, but not enough of the right kind of anger to get her going again ( _ and wouldn’t they just love it if that was the case? _ ).

“No,” she says bluntly, gritting her teeth and dragging her head off her hand. Cut right to the heart of things, why not. These are the people who got her here, after all, sitting in her room too tired to do anything but exist.

(She’s not sure if she even wants to do that right now.)

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Is traffic a problem? We can send you an airlift-“

Pink, she decides. And she doesn’t really feel like talking but she pushes herself to say something anyway. “Traffic’s not a problem, May,” she stretches out. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

There’s a shocked silence on the other end, and saying the words after years of thinking them gives a relief so pure that Peni just wants to laugh. When a moment passes and May is still apparently in shock, Peni sees her shot to get out of this conversation. She hangs up.

———————

It takes four minutes for someone to physically come to her room when Peni was banking on at least five. Despite everything, she’s a little impressed.

“Come on, Peni,” Ben says from the doorway. 

And Peni is- still making her  _ restaurant _ , her dumb  _ restaurant _ , with the pink walls and wooden counters and yellow floor, a hundred little customizable options. And she pops back at Ben the only thing she can really say.

“No.”

And there come the disappointed eyes. “Peni, if there’s something wrong we can discuss it later, but right now-“

“Ben,” she cuts across him. She looks him directly in the eyes. “I’m tired of it.”

_ Way to go, dumbass. Now you sound like a bratty teenager. Selfish. _

A second afterward, she pushes herself out of her chair and collapses on her bed again. She rolls over to face the wall, her heart hammering, coiled like a wire ready to deck him if he tries to pull her out the door- because she  _ will _ right now, she doesn’t even care, she’ll do it, she  _ will _ .

She clenches her hand into a fist in preparation and holds it to her chest.

What can they even do if she says no? Shove her into the suit and force her to pilot it? Can they? Would they?

There’s a couple minutes of tense silence. At some point afterward Ben starts saying something again, but the words slide in and out of her ears before she can string them together. He leaves when she doesn’t move, but funnily enough, her body doesn’t relax.

(He must have heard something in her voice.)

———————

May comes next. May talks too, another little speech, but even though the words don’t blur together this time like they did with Ben she can’t bring herself to do anything more than listen to them. The May Parker in Miles’ universe was nice, she thinks softly while staring at the ceiling. The May Parker in Miles’ universe gave her cookies and lemonade and her eyebrows pinched when Peni said that she started when she was nine.

May comes to sit down on Peni’s bed, and her knee-jerk reaction makes her want to tell them to get the hell out of her room. A moment later she realizes she can, and she sits up and does.

May and Ben exchange looks, have a tense conversation in the hallway that Peni could listen in on if she gave a fuck, and leave.

———————

They back off. It’s the first time they’ve ever done that, really. May still leaves a voicemail asking her to come talk soon when she can.

And it’s so-  _ strange _ . Not them backing off (but that too), but just, all of it. Everything has a strange, liquidy feeling, like all of reality just broke open and shifted four inches to the left. Over and over, Peni keeps wandering around in her room aimlessly, thinking  _ what am I doing?  _

_ What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing? _

She understands the benefits of being a spider-hero. Of course she does. Saving people, helping people, giving back to the community, doing work where you’re most needed, giving people an inspiration to follow, righting injustice, bringing evil to task- see? She can list them off and everything. And somehow, she feels nothing.

She knows objectively why she did this job for so long, why it’s worth it. And yet, it’s like that part of her is just- dead. She doesn’t care. She feels nothing for it.

( _ Is this what a breakdown...feels like? Good to know. _ )

She looks back on her years of being SP//dr and it’s like seeing it in harsh black and white with nothing but the bad, a cynical loop of fear and pressure and anger and pain. She looks back and just narrows her eyes and says she doesn’t understand the point, how any of it was worth it.

Why would she be SP//dr? Why would anyone?

It’s dark now. Probably pretty late. She checks the news and sees a story about the bank robbery that she was supposed to stop- the robbers weren’t caught and are predicted to strike again in the future. No deaths, but a bank teller is in critical condition.

Peni stares at the words and tries to call something up.

She feels nothing.

———————————

_ What is she doing? This is crazy, what is happening, what is she  _ doing _ - _

———————————

She’s not answering in the chat, and they’re probably noticing. She’s not answering anything from May or Ben or Oscorp, and they’re  _ definitely _ noticing. 73 unread notifications.

It’s about the next morning when it hits her in a panic that if she doesn’t go talk to Ben and May they’ll probably come to her again, and she can’t handle that. It’s enough to overcome her burnt-out inertia, and she actually gets up and stumbles out of the room. 

About a minute and two downward flights of stairs later, she realizes that she forgot her phone and goes back to get it. And- and if she stays put it’ll only be so long before Oscorp tries to get a hold of her again, and people are probably already starting to wonder even now where SP//dr is. The entire world either knows one of her identities or both, and she wants to  _ leave  _ and just escape it all for a moment, pretend that none of it exists. And unlike most people, she actually has that option.

She stares at the device she rigged for jumps across universes and bites her lip.

There’s two choices here: the hard choice (stay, work things out, probably put her shit aside and become SP//dr again) and the easy one (leave, ignore her problems, escape for just a bit).

She’s tired of making the hard choices. Let someone else make them.

She presses the button.

————————

Peni forgets until the exact moment that she makes the jump that for whatever reason, Noir’s universe is a couple hours behind hers timezone-wise. There’s a thousand year gap between their universes, so it could really be for any reason.

Point is, it’s night.

And it’s  _ raining _ ! Great!

Peni has only actually been to Noir’s universe once before because even though the people here’s eyes aren’t built to perceive color, they can still detect that something’s a little off when they look at it. She steps slowly out of the alleyway and a person walking by does a double take- though that could really be for anything from her age to her clothes instead.

She doesn’t exactly have a plan. Knowing about the history of the 1930s doesn’t translate to knowing her way around this city, and she didn’t tell Noir that she was coming. She’s just being impulsive and stupid and selfish,  _ yes _ , she doesn’t need someone to tell her. 

She closes her eyes and forcibly wills the thoughts out of her head. She came here to escape, so she might as well follow through.

It’s freezing, so she finds the biggest and least struggling-looking store in the area and spends five minutes reminding herself that they didn’t have security cameras in the 1930s before grabbing a jacket and running off with it. It’s warm, but still. New low.

And just like when her phone screen with the alert went dim, it’s somehow easy to pretend all her responsibilities don’t exist when she’s not staring at them. As if they’re not real- as if all of that was just a weird, blurry dream and the only thing that  _ is _ real is just Peni Parker wandering through a black and white version of 1930s New York at night.

How did this even happen? How did she get here?

People are still avoiding her for- for whatever reason she supposes, but even if they didn’t it’s fine because she knows how to do hand to hand and has weapons on her that would knock the socks off of anyone from the 1930s besides. So when she hears someone turn the corner and start walking some distance behind her, her ears prick but she doesn’t react otherwise. Until,

“What the hell?”

Peni whips around and it’s Noir, in full Spider get-up, looking like he’s trying to decipher why she’s here from everything down to the way she’s standing.

“Peni? What’re you doing here?” 

Peni fidgets under his gaze, and she wonders if being seen talking with a teenage girl is going to hurt his Spider-Man reputation or something. Eventually she just shrugs.

He looks at her with an expression that maybe would have been indecipherable even if he hadn’t been wearing a mask. After a moment, he sighs. “Alright. Come on, we can go back to my place.” He turns and waves for her to walk with him, and she follows along.

Noir’s apartment is messy, and she gets the feeling that having people over ceased to be a possibility in his mind a while ago. Peni suddenly feels like she would have made a cheerful joke about the mess if she’d come at a different time, or maybe that she’s still supposed to now. 

Nothing really comes to mind. She just stands there, arms hanging limply at her sides.

She turns and Noir is staring at her. He clears his throat quietly, turning away. “You can take the bed if you want, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Peni feels, also, like she’s supposed to argue with that to try to make the inconvenience on him a little less, but can’t think of anything to say on this either. Still, the guilt hits a little harder for this one. “Sorry,” she says.

Noir shrugs in a smooth motion. “It’s fine,” he says, then goes off to do- who knows. House stuff. 

He doesn’t ask why she’s here, or how long she’s staying, or what she’s actually going to do out here. Part of her is disappointed, but another part is just purely relieved.

Eventually, she finds Noir’s bedroom and collapses on top of it, shucking off her shoes but nothing else. She lies there and stares at the ceiling, and doesn’t remember when she falls asleep.

——————————

She falls asleep on top of the covers. She wakes up underneath them, with her shoes pushed together near the door.

——————————

Besides the Spider-Man-ing, Noir has some kind of day job. She doesn’t totally remember what it is or if he’s mentioned it before, but regardless, he’s not always in the apartment.

She walks around in it, sleeps a lot, reads some of his books. A lot of them are in language  _ just  _ old-timey enough that reading them is somewhat uncomfortable.

Noir still doesn’t ask. And he almost doesn’t need to, really- spidering is a dangerous job. No one needs to tell them that it comes with hazards. Even though she’s physically fine, there are a hundred plausible scenarios that could have caused Peni to run away from home and sit motionlessly in another spider’s house the way she is.

It’s nice. It’s not- she wouldn’t say that she’s  _ happy _ , but that’s more her own deal than anything about the location. Noir’s already made space for her without question, and she even thinks that he feels bad sometimes because most of what he eats (and therefore, gives to Peni) is very cheap or badly cooked.

It’s fine. She doesn’t have much appetite, but that’s unrelated. Being here feels better than struggling to keep going as SP//dr did, although sometimes she thinks about what frantic efforts the people at Oscorp are probably making to find her and her stomach clenches painfully.

On her third day there- although everything feels dreamlike and she needs to count back on her fingers to figure out the days- she figures she probably needs to say something.

“I started when I was nine,” she says over the dinner table, into the quiet. Noir stills, but he does a reasonably good job of hiding it.

She stabs a piece of something or other with her fork directly after, almost embarrassed.

“Started being SP//dr?” Noir says a second later.

“Yeah.”

Noir pauses. “Hmm,” he says finally. Somehow it feels like there’s a world of meaning behind it, but he’s holding it back.

Does he disapprove? Is this normal? She wants to ask if the scientists were wrong to do what they did but she’s afraid that he’ll just say no, and that adults know something about childhood that she doesn’t understand. Her head spins.

“It was my dad, originally,” she finds herself saying. “But he died. And the suit has to…” she knows the science but doesn’t know how to explain on a 1930s level right now, and ends up just waving her hand vaguely. “It was made to work specifically for my dad. It would have been too difficult to make it work for someone completely different. I was the closest living relative, so they recruited me.” 

She pops another piece of vegetable into her mouth, then leans her head on her hand. “Been doing it ever since,” she says, the words almost feeling like they’re floating on a singsong.

Noir is gripping his fork slightly too hard. It takes her a moment to notice, at which point he forces himself to relax. He puts the fork down, though, and starts putting away the rest of his food untouched.

“Pretty young,” he says shortly, his movements slightly jerky.

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

That makes him stop. He finally leans against the counter and sighs, turning around. “Alright, Peni. I wasn’t going to ask but I need to know before this goes any farther- did something happen? Why did you come here?” She opens her mouth and he quickly adds, “I’m not going to kick you out.”

She just stares at him. “Do you think the scientists were right? To recruit me?” she says instead.

Noir grimaces, then takes a deep breath. “I’ve been holding it back because I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to [pressure/confront] you, but- No. You’re too young and nine is even worse. They never should have dragged you into their war.”

And Peni thought she was already broken but at that, something inside of her immediately snaps. She starts shaking, pushing her face into her hands to hide how she’s crying. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” falls out in a rush. “I woke up and I was so tired and I couldn’t do it anymore-” 

Noir curses under his breath and quickly steps over to her, then freezes in the action. “Can I, uh- can I hug you?” he says, and Peni would almost laugh at the awkwardness if she weren’t crying so hard.

“S-sure,” she says anyway.

He says some other things, but they blur and by the next morning she doesn’t remember them. She does remember the hug, though.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Yeet, thanks for reading! I do have plans to continue, but in the meantime this felt like a good stopping point. As I said, I'm posting this faster than normal so I'd actually welcome constructive criticism, just to see. don't be awkward, really tell me what you think
> 
> Comment please! yeet bye


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